"If you favor me in any way, to the detriment of any of the others or your own, I won't go on! I'm just one of you. Just one of the survivors, on even terms with the rest. It's give-and-take. I mean that! You've got to understand me!"
The Master nodded. He knew that tone. Silently he put on his jacket, again.
The lieutenant's orderly, Lebon, groaned and muttered a prayer to the
Virgin. Leclair sat up, heavily, and blinked with sand-inflamed eyes.
"Time to drink again, n'est-ce pas, my Captain?" asked he. "Drink to the dead!"
"I hope they are dead, rather than prisoners!" exclaimed the Master. "Yes, we'll drink, and get forward. We've got to make long strides, tonight. Those Jannati Shahr devils may be after us, tomorrow. Surely will, if they investigate that delta and find only a few bodies. They'll conclude some of us have got through. And if they pick up our trail, with those white dromedaries of theirs—"
"The sacred pigs!" ejaculated Leclair. "Ah, messieurs, now you begin to know the Arabs as I have long known them." With eyes of hate and pain he peered back at the darkening line of the Iron Mountains.
Bohannan, already loosening the neck of his goat-skin, laughed hoarsely.
"No wine!" he croaked, "and the water's rationed; even the stinking water. But the food isn't—good reason, too; there isn't any. Pockets full of gems!" He slapped one hard pocket. "I'd swap the lot for a proper pair of shoes and a skin o' that wine! Faith—that wine, now—"
The woman suddenly sat up, too, one hand on the hot gravel, the other raised for silence.
"Hark!" she whispered. "Sh!"